I didn’t know which option was worse. At least if Daxton were dead, others could steer the country toward the Blackcoats’ ideal, no matter what happened to me and Greyson. But if he had been Masked again—if there was an endless supply of Daxton Harts sitting around in a facility somewhere, ready to take the old one’s place—then we were never going to win.
“If you will, Miss Hart,” said a second guard, taking my arm and leading me to my suite down the hall, which I hadn’t slept in since arriving. I dug my heels in and tried to return to Greyson, but the guard’s grip was incredibly strong.
“Greyson!” I shouted, yanking so hard that I was sure my arm would be bruised in the morning. “Let me go. I’m staying with my cousin.”
“No, you aren’t.” The guard opened the door and unceremoniously flung me inside. I stumbled and landed on the floor, but he didn’t seem to care. He slammed the door shut firmly behind me, and I sat there in silence, my head spinning. Whatever this was, it was clear something had gone horribly wrong.
All I could do was wait.
* * *
The first thing I did was hide the gun.
I tried to open a window to get rid of it, but they were all firmly locked, and I wouldn’t be able to control where it landed anyway. It was entirely likely it would bounce into the open grass, and even if I did manage to makeit land in the shrubs, a gardener would find it eventually, and it wouldn’t be difficult to guess where it came from.
Instead I hollowed out a thick book with the blade of a razor. It was crude, but it worked, and I returned the book to its place on the shelf. It wasn’t the best hiding spot in the world, but it was better than underneath my bed.
I waited for Greyson to contact me on the ear cuff, but the crackle of static never came through. Maybe he’d forgotten about it, though that seemed unlikely, and the more time that passed, the more anxious I became. I tried everything I could think of to escape that room and get to Greyson, even if all I could do was make sure he was okay, but there were guards stationed at my door constantly, and I had no doubt the same was true for his. Days passed, and my meals were brought to me on silver platters, but no amount of finery could disguise the fact that once again, I was a prisoner.
No one answered my questions about the state of Daxton’s health. If he was dead, if he was alive but barely hanging on, if he was perfectly fine and playing yet another sadistic game—no one said a word. Over and over, I pictured the shooting in my mind, trying to figure out where he’d been hit. Or if he’d been hit at all. I hadn’t seen any blood, but we’d been ushered out of there so quickly that it was impossible to say for sure whether there had been any or not.
At last, five days after I’d tried to kill Daxton—or succeeded, and didn’t know it yet—my door burst open. I sat on the couch with my sketch pad, expecting a servant with my lunch. Instead, two guards strode in and immediatelytook me by the arms, hauling me to my feet.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I growled, struggling against them, but they swiftly yanked my hands behind my back and handcuffed my wrists. Neither of them offered an explanation as they half led, half dragged me out of the suite and down the hall. I twisted around in time to see the guards standing in front of Greyson’s door, and the knot in my stomach lessened. At least Greyson was still all right. Or as all right as he could be whenhe probably hadn’t left his room in days, either.
The guards led me down the grand staircase and into the wing that had, until this moment, been completely off-limits to me: the master-suite wing, where Daxton had spent all his time holed up away from us, scheming and plotting and doing whatever it was he did each day. Coming up with more ways to destroy the lives of innocent people, I supposed. He wasn’t good for much else.
His wing was double the size of my suite, Greyson’s, and Knox’s put together, and it was decorated in the same warm woods and colors as the rest of the house. But the deeper we went down the hallway, the colder the air seemed to grow, until at last the guards opened a door near the end of the corridor.
It was a plain room with white walls, but the stench of human waste, blood, and fear punched me in the gut, making my stomach heave. “I’m not going in there,” I said, nearly choking on the putrid air.
“Oh, yes, you are,” said a voice inside. Daxton appeared from behind the door, wearing a black apron over his suit and holding what looked like a curved saw. The blade dripped with fresh blood. “Surprised to see me, Lila?”
I gaped at Daxton, my mouth dry and the edges of my vision going dark. I searched for any sign that he was a replacement, but no one could mimic the coldness in his voice and the sadistic glint in his eye. I hadn’t done it. I hadn’t killed him.
Failure and shame and pure self-loathing washed over me, squeezing me in a vise grip from which there was no escape. That was twice now I’d failed to murder the man known as Daxton Hart. At least this time, it wasn’t from lackof trying.